The MEA region's PC market experienced another quarter of steep decline in Q2 2013 as the proliferation of mobile technology continued unabated.

According to preliminary results released last week by International Data Corporation (IDC), shipments of PCs into the Middle East, Africa, and Turkey slowed 18.3%, year on year, during the second quarter of 2013 to a total of 4.4m units. Desktops were the hardest hit, with shipments down 20.0%, year on year, to 1.8m units, while notebook shipments declined 17.1% over the same period to a total of 2.6m units.

"A growing portion of end users, primarily from the consumer segment, are shifting their spending from PCs to tablets and smartphones," said Fouad Rafiq Charakla, a research manager for personal computing, systems, and infrastructure solutions at IDC Middle East, Africa, and Turkey.

"This was accompanied by ongoing instability in several parts of the Middle East and Africa region, which resulted in PC spending by both the commercial and consumer segments plummeting at an even faster rate.

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"Intel and Microsoft have made keen efforts to revive the position of PCs against tablets, particularly in light of the latter adapting its operating system to a touch-screen interface. However, Google's Android and Apple's iOS still outperform Microsoft's Windows 8 when it comes to the number of applications the respective operating systems offer, which has a direct negative impact on the user experience.

"At the same time, the growing availability of aggressively priced tablet models, including those offered by multinational vendors, is continuing to encourage growing numbers of end users to switch to this increasingly popular form factor."

While decline in PC sales is a world wide trend, attributing wrong local reasons is not the correct way to justify this. With around 20% of MEA business happening in Saudi Arabia, you comment that lot of expats have left Saudi is totally incorrect. KSA have around 12 million expats and hardly around 20000 have left on account of new rules, which incidentally have been posponed to November as Saudi government is slowly realising that this is not the correct approach. 99% of people who have left are laborers and jobless expats and hardly affect any PC sales.